Category Archives: Development

I haven’t previously looked at Flash Lite development. I must confess i have been a little blinkered by the new features in flash 8, as a result the idea of ‘down grading’ my scripting to what appears to be a mish mash of flash 4 and flash 5 ActionScript 1 did not really appeal.

However, i have been keeping a little eye on the uptake and it does seem that its time to start adding Flash Lite to the quiver of my skills. Especially when the devices you get to work on are as cool as these little beauties.

The photo gallery I produced in flash 8 is a simple experiment in flash AS 2 classes, inheritance and event modelling. The current gallery loads its information from an XML file, this XML file is currently rather large as it contains extraneous information intended for other presentation files.

The XML parsing is handled using the AS 2 XPath API Classes.

[as]import mx.xpath.XPathAPI;[/as]

This implementation uses only the flash 8 filters really but the plan is to actually hop, skip, and jump the future development straight into the AS3 frame work and class structure.

The code below is the AS classes that control the presentation as it currently stands, please excuse the lack of commenting these files are provided ‘As Is’.

Better accessibility including support for DHTML accessibility and assistive technologies such as the Window-Eyes 5.5 beta screen reader for Microsoft Windows. Screen readers read aloud all available information in applications and documents or show the information on a Braille display, enabling blind and visually impaired users to use equivalent software functionality as their sighted peers.

Report a broken Web site wizard to report Web sites that are not working in Firefox.

Better support for Mac OS X (10.2 and greater) including profile migration from Safari and Mac Internet Explorer.

New support for Web Standards including SVG, CSS 2 and CSS 3, and JavaScript 1.6.

Many moons ago, when flash was still young, and this user was in University. Well some days at any rate. I owned a domain. That domain was the focus of a lot of time and frustration. But it was my bit of the net, and I loved it.

During all the kafuffle of the Dot.Com boom I moved flat a couple of times and some where along the line I missed the renewal window on that domain. As a result a nasty search engine swooped down and snuck my domain away from me.

Ten Years on I have that domain back. Evidently the hits I was getting back then, for my flash tutorials, Generator ranting and general young pompish flash behaviour, had died to a trickle of the former glory and so my domain was no longer the prime real estate that search engines like.

I haven’t finished reading this article yet, but it seems to start off in an area I can understand well. Also given that I know some developers (no.1, no.2) that are wrestling with flash in a RIA development; I thought it was quite relevant.

It’s amazing that some companies just don’t listen to the developers that are trying to build there products.

The Fist thing was to transfer my early light site (bittube.com) into Flash 8. The site was originally produced using 90% code with a few classes and obviously the Bitmaps.
Using the new Bitmap capabilities in Flash 8 and some of the filters i was able to drop the processing requirements of the site and also the file size. Not to mention that now the whole Shebang is Code generated, with the exception of the loaded bitmaps of course.

The next job was to provide a photo gallery that would show the loaded background images from the site in a more user friendly format, (thanks to Sean for the prompt). Again the whole lot is Code generated, so nice and small on the file size and driven by XML, so easy to update.